Possessing the Secret of Joy (6 page)

I
T WAS HEARTBREAKING
to see, on their return, how passive Tashi had become. No longer cheerful, or impish. Her movements, which had always been graceful, and quick with the liveliness of her personality, now became merely graceful. Slow. Studied. This was true even of her smile; which she never seemed to offer you without considering it first. That her soul had been dealt a mortal blow was plain to anyone who dared look into her eyes.

Adam brought her home to us just as we were about to leave for America. He married her, our father presiding, even as she protested that, in America, he would grow ashamed of her because of the scars on her face. The evening before the wedding, Adam had these same Olinka tribal markings carved into his own cheeks. His handsome face was swollen; his smile, because of the pain involved, impossible. No one spoke of the other, the hidden scar, between Tashi’s thin legs. The scar that gave her the classic Olinka woman’s walk, in which the feet appear to slide forward and are rarely raised above the ground. No one mentioned the eternity it took her to use the w.c. No one mentioned the smell.

In America, we solved the problem of cleaning behind the scar by using a medical syringe that looked like a small turkey baster, and this relieved Tashi of an embarrassment so complete she had taken to spending half the month completely hidden from human contact, virtually buried.

O
N VERY WARM DAYS
The Old Man took us sailing on his boat, up and down and all around Lake Zurich. His ruddy face eager before so much sun, his large hands moving deftly in a contest with tide and wind. His age suddenly amounting to no more than his head of wispy white hair. I would stand hugging the mast, or else sit low in the boat and feel the spray cool and refreshing on my skin.

The Old Man and even Adam seemed mesmerized by my absorption in the water of the lake, which was to me a small sea. I felt their eyes on me, approvingly.

Ja,
The Old Man would say to Adam. Your wife is
glow
ing.

Ja,
I thought to myself. Perhaps that is a good sign.

A
T NIGHT THE OLD MAN
played music for us. Music from Africa, India, Bali. He had an amazing record collection that occupied one wall of his house. He showed us grainy black-and-white films, made on his trips. It was during the showing of one of these films that something peculiar happened to me. He was explaining a scene in which there were several small children lying in a row on the ground. He thought, first of all, that they were boys, which I could see straight off they were not, though their heads were shaved and they each wore a scanty loincloth. He assumed, he said, he had inadvertently interrupted a kind of ritual ceremony having to do with the preparation of these children for adulthood. Everything, in any case, had stopped, the moment he and his entourage entered the ritual space. And what was also odd, he said, was how no one spoke a word, or even moved, as long as he and his people were there. They literally froze as the camera panned the area. The children on the ground in a little row, lying close together on their backs, the adults simply stopped in midactivity, unmoving, even, it appeared, unseeing. Only—he laughed, relighting his pipe, which had gone out, as it frequently did, while he talked—there was a large fighting cock (which we now saw as it stepped majestically into the frame) and it walked about quite freely, crowing mightily (it was a silent film but we could certainly perceive its exertions), and that was the only sound or movement while we were there.

The film ran on, but suddenly I felt such an overwhelming fear that I fainted. Quietly. Slid off my chair and onto the bright rug that covered the stone floor. It was exactly as if I had been hit over the head. Except there was no pain.

When I came to, I was in the guest bedroom upstairs in the turret. Adam and the old man were bending over me. There was nothing I could tell them; I could not say, The picture of a fighting cock, taken twenty-five years ago, completely terrorized me. And so I laughed off my condition and said it was caused by too much happiness, sailing in the high altitude.

The Old Man looked skeptical and did not seem surprised when, the next afternoon, I began to paint what became a rather extended series of ever larger and more fearsome fighting cocks.

And then one day, into the corner of my painting, there appeared, I drew, a foot. Sweating and shivering as I did so. Because I suddenly realized there was something, some small thing the foot was holding between its toes. It was for this small thing that the giant cock waited, crowing impatiently, extending its neck, ruffling its feathers, and strutting about.

There are no words to describe how sick I felt as I painted. How nauseous; as the cock continued to grow in size, and the bare foot with its little insignificant morsel approached steadily toward what felt would be the crisis, the unbearable moment, for me. For, as I painted, perspiring, shivering, and moaning faintly, I felt that every system in my body, every connecting circuit in my brain, was making an effort to shut down. It was as if the greater half of my being were trying to murder the lesser half, and as I painted—by now directly onto the wall of the bedroom, because only there could I paint the cock as huge as it now appeared to be: it dwarfed me—I dragged the brush to paint each towering iridescent green feather, each baleful gold fleck in its colossal red and menacing eye.

The foot grew large too. But not nearly as large as the cock.

When The Old Man looked at it he said: Well, Evelyn, is it a man’s foot or a woman’s foot?

The question puzzled me so profoundly I could not answer, but only held my head between my hands in the classic pose of the deeply insane.

A man’s foot? A woman’s foot?

How could one know?

But then later, in the middle of the night, I found myself painting a design called “crazy road,” a pattern of crisscrosses and dots that the women made with mud on the cotton cloth they wove in the village when I was a child. And I suddenly knew that the foot above which I painted this pattern was a woman’s, and that I was painting the lower folds of one of M’Lissa’s tattered wraps.

As I painted I remembered, as if a lid lifted off my brain, the day I had crept, hidden in the elephant grass, to the isolated hut from which came howls of pain and terror. Underneath a tree, on the bare ground outside the hut, lay a dazed row of little girls, though to me they seemed not so little. They were all a few years older than me. Dura’s age. Dura, however, was not among them; and I knew instinctively that it was Dura being held down and tortured inside the hut. Dura who made those inhuman shrieks that rent the air and chilled my heart.

Abruptly, inside, there was silence. And then I saw M’Lissa shuffle out, dragging her lame leg, and at first I didn’t realize she was carrying anything, for it was so insignificant and unclean that she carried it not in her fingers but between her toes. A chicken—a hen, not a cock—was scratching futilely in the dirt between the hut and the tree where the other girls, their own ordeal over, lay. M’Lissa lifted her foot and flung this small object in the direction of the hen, and she, as if waiting for this moment, rushed toward M’Lissa’s upturned foot, located the flung object in the air and then on the ground, and in one quick movement of beak and neck, gobbled it down.

D
EAREST
L
ISETTE,

How much I would like to see you, to hold you, to hear your wise words. All night long I have not slept, and I am writing outside in the loggia by the light of a candle, just as the sun is rising over the lake. It is so beautiful here, and so peaceful! Sometimes Evelyn and I are able to enjoy it, along with the agreeable conversation of your charming uncle. At least the two of them get along. As you know, I had feared they would not; Evelyn does not take easily to doctors of any sort, and has, over the years, tended to leave her therapists prostrate in her wake.

As you suggested, the fact that I am here with her, and that this is an isolated, quiet and beautiful spot, seems to calm her. She seems also to like the fact that your uncle is old. She is sometimes merry just at the sight of him, and thinks of him, I believe, as a kind of Santa Claus. As such, he is another representative of the exotic Western and European culture she so adores.

But why, I can hear you wondering, am I up at this hour, and have been up all night? I will tell you. A few nights ago, while your uncle was showing some of his old films of his trip to East Africa—the ones that mesmerized you as a youngster and were the impetus behind your trip to Africa, where we met…! Anyway, he was showing these films to us after a day of picnicking and sailing as far south as Schmerikon and as far north as Kusnacht. We’d feasted, when we arrived back at the house, on a fine dinner of roast pork and potatoes that your uncle had managed to leave cooking for us in the old fireless cooker left to him by his grandmother—perhaps, this fireless cooker, the most intriguing example of his magic, as far as Evelyn is concerned! To be brief, near the end of one of these films, she fainted, her body rigid as death, her teeth clenched in a fierce grimace and, most strange of all, her eyes open. So of course we thought for a moment she’d died. When she came to later she tried to laugh the whole thing off and said she wasn’t used to so much activity—sailing and walking and eating—in the unfamiliar altitude.

Though we have a room in a hotel in Schmerikon, we sometimes spend the night with your uncle, especially when he and Evelyn are working particularly well together, and so we stayed the night in the guest bedroom the night this happened. Evelyn slept badly. In the morning she rose early and began, even before breakfast, to paint.

She began to paint a chicken. Over and over. On larger and larger paper. She grew frenzied as the size of the paper she held in her hand seemed to shrink in comparison to the monstrous bird she had in her mind. Then there was the question of how to blend the paints she had—which your uncle had kindly given her—to make something she called a black chromium green. She was frantic to manufacture this color, and this color alone, for the tail feathers of the beast. Her mood was impatient, foul, as she tore the smaller drawings into bits and tore her hair as well, all the while oblivious to the presence of your uncle, who sat on a canvas chair out by the lake, reading, or pretending to; or of my distracted attempts to repair a broken pot that I’d noticed tossed in a corner near the hearth. It looked pre-Columbian, and I handled the shards, and the glue, carefully.

Abruptly, she left us, taking her paints and brushes along. There was a loud snap as she closed the shutter of the upstairs bedroom. And then there was quiet. Only the lapping of the water, the chirping of birds, the rustle of wind in the trees. I fixed the pot, as well as I could do considering a third of it was missing. The Old Man’s book now rested on his knees; he was sound asleep.

When night came, I avoided going up to bed. All seemed quiet up there, and I did not want to cause any disturbance; I hoped Evelyn had yielded to exhaustion and drifted into one of her deep, coma-like sleeps that could last for days. But when I finally found myself on the stairs, I noticed a light underneath our door. Opening the door, I was confronted with Evelyn, still busily painting, after twelve hours or more! And now painting a humongous feathered creature—for it was too menacing and evil to be given the simple appellation of chicken or cock—directly onto your uncle’s formerly pristine white walls.

She looked about to drop. But, hearing me enter, she turned and stared. Unseeing, certainly, for she neither spoke nor acknowledged me further. Merely whirled back to her monstrous painting, and appeared to fling herself at it.

I was chilled to the bone. Not only by the wild, ill, distraught look of her; I was used to that; but by the damage she was doing, uncaring, to your uncle’s house, and by the painting itself. I did not know its meaning to her, of course, but even without knowing it, I felt the evil she was encountering deep in my own soul.

So, Lisette, that is why I am up so early after a sleepless night.

I trust you are well and that you will continue to write to me care of your uncle. Your letters sustain and comfort me, as they have all these years. I count it the great blessing of my life to be able to call you friend.

Yours,

Adam

W
HEN AT LAST
I completed my painting of “The Beast,” as the three of us would subsequently refer to it, my mind and body were beyond exhaustion. I fell backward onto the bed and slept. It was late evening of another day when I awoke to the sound of the wind in the trees, the waves of the lake lapping the shore, and the muted sound of voices. I felt no inclination to stir. I lay as I had fallen, merely turning apprehensive eyes slowly left, toward the wall, to look fully into the wicked gaze of my creature. It no longer frightened me. Indeed, I felt as if I were seeing the cause of my anxiety itself for the first time, exactly as it was. The cock was undeniably overweening, egotistical, puffed up, and it was his diet of submission that had made him so.

I gazed at the foot. Lame, subservient, mindless—as if disconnected from the body of the woman above it. M’Lissa. Here the serenity of my mind sharply decreased. I felt my emotions surge painfully toward the hem of her wrapper. Overcome with grief, I shifted my tearfilled gaze at just the moment Adam’s handsome head appeared at the door, followed by Mzee, who carried a tray.

They brought oxtail soup, rye bread, carrot sticks, a sprig of parsley, a cup of warm cider and a bouquet of flowers. They propped me up in bed with gentleness and a mildly expectant air. As I ate they entertained me by telling of the culinary adventure they’d had preparing the meal. The Old Man had concocted the soup, from his memory of his mother’s recipe; Adam had made the bread. The parsley, carrots and flowers were from the garden behind the house. Mzee apologized for the woodiness of the carrots that had been left in the earth too long; but I enjoyed them best of all. Their fibrousness scrubbed and refreshed my mouth in a coolly resistant, pleasant way.